Cleveland Poetry

The week­end is here and in cel­e­bra­tion, I’m going to put togeth­er as much Cleve­land Poet­ry [and per­haps a bit of music] infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble. Maybe you can catch some­thing on the flip side.

From the Cleve­land Scene:

Poetry/Open Mic Nights

Ara­bi­ca Cof­fee­house (Bed­ford)
720 Broad­way
440.439.0555
Open Mic host­ed by Dave Ter­ry, 7pm every Thurs­day

Ara­bi­ca Cof­fee­house (Cleve­land)
818 E. 185th
216.486.7777
Open Mic, 8pm every Sat­ur­day

Ara­bi­ca Cof­fee­house (Cleve­land Hts.)
2209 Lee
216.321.0761
Open Mic host­ed by Char­lie Mos­brooks, 8pm every Tues­day

Ara­bi­ca Cof­fee­house (Uni­ver­si­ty Cir­cle)
11300 Juniper
216.791.0300
Open Mic host­ed by Steve2.net, every Wednes­day

B‑side Lounge
2785 Euclid Hts.
216.932.1966
Open Mic host­ed by Xela, 7:30pm every Mon­day

Luck­y’s Café
777 Stark­weath­er
216.622.7773
Open Poet­ry with Russ Vidrick, every 2nd Sat­ur­day 5pm-7pm

Many more can be found along the right hand side of this page. It would prob­a­bly be best to call them first, since I don’t know the last time any of those were updat­ed.

Poet­as­tic Link­age:

There is a Cleve­land Poet­ry Meet­up Group whose next meet­ing is sched­uled for Wednes­day, April 20, 2005 at 8:00 PM.

The Cleve­land Poet­ics Yahoo! Group seems to be the best bet in regard to up-to-the-minute inside infor­ma­tion. Looks active!

Deep Cleve­land is a local LLC that has the very cool Kid Poet pro­gram as well as pub­lish­ing local writ­ers and encour­ag­ing peo­ple to be grapho­ma­ni­acs.

The Cleve­land State Poet­ry Cen­ter has tons of more aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly toned poet­ry stuff going on.

Despite their ter­ri­ble web­site poets’ and writ­ers’ league of greater cleve­land offers a ton of class­es and work­shops for aspir­ing writ­ers of all kinds. Hey, when you’re busy writ­ing, you don’t have time to pimp out a site.

The Lake­wood Pub­lic Library has its own poet­ry stuff going on as well.

Cleve­land Poets:

Now the excit­ing part! Cleve­land poets!

Michael Salinger:

it was like
acci­den­tal­ly inter­rupt­ing your moth­er
while she chowed down on a human fore­arm
you nev­er talk about it

Don Ian­none:

fire engine red sun­set
my heart burns out of con­trol
life’s hills dis­ap­pear

Sara Hol­brook:

Will my ears grow long as Grand­pa’s?
What makes us look like kin?
Tell me where’d I get long eye­lash­es
and where’d I get my chin?

Lau­ren Spisak:

This frag­ile sculp­ture
of feath­er and bone
is craft unrav­el­ing,
shock uncurl­ing
towards some heav­en.

With all of this poet­ry stuff going on, I’m kind of bummed that I’ve only received one poem sub­mis­sion for my con­test.

Who/What did I for­get on this list?